A generation ago, their forerunners - Acorn - were happy to take, use and make a profit from the work of American universities, yet when Berkeley asked to be able to use Arm's ISA for research purposes, they got short shrift.
So Berkeley cobbling together a next-generation RISC ISA, and Foundation-ing it out of reach of the same thing happening again, is smart retribution.
On RISC-V? Yes... Well sort of. There are people working on ports of Fedora, Debian and OpenSuse (I think) and I've seen some version of BSD working on SiFive's boards. Debian is said to be 95% complete. Ubuntu have also announced that they're working on a port, and SkiffOS is said to be ready to run on RISC-V too. There was also a demo of AOSP working on 3 XuanTie 910 cores a few weeks ago.
Of course, then you need apps to be ported over, and that might take longer.
Sure, RISC-V designs can be open or not... And of course there's always the cost of fabbing.
There're already designs freely available to use though, either as they are, or to build upon.
And there are also now many other companies designing using the ISA; decentralising the production of chips.
But - over and above the revolutionary economics of it - it's being recognised as a good ISA, and RISC-V cores are already being incorporated into consumer electronics.
I'm really excited, to the point of distraction by the RISC-V ISA.
Some people say that there's nothing new in it, but to my mind, they're missing the point : the Berkeley Four took what couldn't be appropriated for profit, and built a statement about what computing is... They revealed the Wizard of Oz to everyone, so that anyone with some computing background can build a processor, freely.
And now this freed wizard is working his magic, and will change the computing landscape irrevocably.
A generation ago, their forerunners - Acorn - were happy to take, use and make a profit from the work of American universities, yet when Berkeley asked to be able to use Arm's ISA for research purposes, they got short shrift.
So Berkeley cobbling together a next-generation RISC ISA, and Foundation-ing it out of reach of the same thing happening again, is smart retribution.